


The (Mis)Education of Lim Jaebeom, Royal Guard to the Person of His Imperial Majesty

by forochel



Category: GOT7, JJ Project
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Historical, Gen, Pre-Relationship, bildungsroman, joseon era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-16 13:46:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21037196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forochel/pseuds/forochel
Summary: OR 5 times Jaebeom may or may not have climbed a tree, and 1 that he definitely forbore from doing so.--Inspired by and set within the same universe asbysine's most excellentin famine, in feast. A little backstory.





	The (Mis)Education of Lim Jaebeom, Royal Guard to the Person of His Imperial Majesty

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bysine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bysine/gifts).
  * Inspired by [in famine, in feast](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20451341) by [bysine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bysine/pseuds/bysine). 

> this is fic of fic of fic -- it's fics all the way down! I started writing this yesterday afternoon, fresh off a theatre-filled weekend whilst my brain was still thinking half in ambiguously period English, and am frankly amazed to have finished it ... today. 
> 
> This was supposed to be a light-hearted, fun thing about Jaebeom falling out of trees and chakho shenanigans.
> 
> It’s still some of that, but … more besides.

**壹**

“Well, the boss likes the lad well,” said Chansung to the travelling bard-swordsman Minjun, who had come to visit at the _chakho_’s stronghold. 

Minjun, who had arrived at the opportune moment to watch Jaebeom fall yet again out of a tree, hummed doubtfully.

“He’s a good lad,” said Taecyeon bracingly. “Doesn’t give up.”

They watched as Jaebeom attempted yet again the particularly tricky problem of ascending She Who Brooketh Not Discontent, a name given by some long-gone_ chakho_ many scores of years past. First there was the problem of her upright trunk, smooth and nigh unscalable if one had not been trained in the lightfooted ways of leaping aloft to the lowest branch that grew far over even the tallest man’s head; and then next being struck – decades ago – with lightning there was the barren, blackened stump out of which had grown new branches, defiant in the face of the heavens as well the attempts of _chakho-_in-training to scale to the very last branch that would bear a full-grown man’s weight. 

“Well, he is sure and light of foot,” Minjun said as Jaebeom took a running leap up the trunk and rebounded off it to catch the lowest branch with his hands, using his momentum to swing back, forth, and land, crouching, on the next branch that spoked half a foot up from the first. “And hand.”

“He was apprentice to that legendary drunkard,” Taecyeon said.

“You think that is an explanation,” said Minjun, “but in fact it is quite the opposite.”

“I LEARNT!” shouted Jaebeom from where he had taken a rest atop the old, lightning-burnt stump of She Who Brooketh Not Discontent. “DESPITE … CIRCUMSTANCES!”

“Oh, aye,” laughed Chansung, “circumstances indeed. Get on, lad, we haven’t got all day!”

With a loud groan, Jaebeom rose from the squat he had sunk into and started shimmying out, belly down, on the one branch that would serve as a launching pad onto the next tree over, The Old Bastard, who was eminently easily scalable but for the terrifying owl that lived in the hollow halfway up the trunk: the eponymous Old Bastard.

“That’s it!” Taecyeon cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed. “Think like a tiger! Move like a tiger!_ Be_ the tiger!”

“Have you ever seen a tiger climb that high?” Minjun asked drily.

“Do be quiet,” said Taecyeon. “Jaebeom receives encouragement well.”

They were all diverted from the imminent squabble when Jaebeom wobbled carefully into a low crouch, breaths held as one, before expelling them in a triumphant roar as he launched himself across the few feet between this branch and the next, and landed, desperate as he was sure-footed, on the sturdy bough of The Old Bastard.

**貳**

It had all started when Junho-hyung had cursed and declared: “I must teach you to run in trees or I shall go white ‘ere we return to my fellows.”

Jaebeom, grateful to not be twelve, alone, and utterly connectionless in a cold world where all that truly mattered as currency was whom one knew and had favours owed from, had nodded and said, “Yes, teacher.”

And then Junho-hyung had winced, possibly because of the bruise on his hip that Jaebeom discovered later was because he had misstepped and fallen out of a maple when hunting the tiger whose pelt he carried.

“Hyung,” he had told Jaebeom to call him. “Merciful Bodhisattva, do not make me old when I am not yet such.”

From his old master, Jaebeom had already learnt to be fleet of foot, to leap in the air and tread upon it as though upon stepping stones across a restless lake.

In the fifteen days it had taken them for them to reach the mountain fastness of the _chakho_, Jaebeom had fallen out of at least as many trees, and learnt the bitter truth that sometimes the solid materiality of trees was not be trusted as much as the elusive tangibility of the air itself.

“You have to listen to them, you know,” Junho-hyung had said as he had stepped lightly along from one then-unidentifiable tree to the next. “And tigers know how to climb trees as well as we do, being great cats. Even better, sometimes.”

“Will I learn to hunt them too?” Jaebeom had asked, with his unbroken voice, still high and fluting.

And Junho-hyung had looked at him, hugging the rough trunk of the oak he had clambered up after Junho in. There had been a look on his face and in his eyes that Jaebeom had been unable to put a finger on. “Perhaps. Now come along and walk out along that bough. And don’t look down.”

Jaebeom had, in fact, looked down.

But he had learnt enough by then to save himself from the wobble, and had set his chin and inched carefully out along the bough, far enough to catch the hand that Junho-hyung had held out to him, palm up.

With a deep breath, Jaebeom had jumped.

**叄**

“I don’t suppose,” Junho-hyung said, looking mildly ill, “that your old master ever spoke to you of … the ways of …” he ran out of words then, and gestured to the inn looming at the end of the alley.

“When he was very much in his cups,” said Jaebeom, “he would recount his conquests.”

Junho-hyung winced. “Well … this ought to be instructive.”

Jaebeom rather thought he might climb up a tree; there was a very likely looking hornbeam hanging over the fence ringing the fast approaching brothel.

As though reading his thoughts, Wooyoung-hyung’s arm fell heavy across his shoulders. “Well, lad, it is past time to make a man of you, eh?”

It was beyond the bounds of possibility that after nigh three years of running with the _chakho – _or even before that – apprenticing with the legendary drunkard (and swordsman) in the sort of village that they lived in, that Jaebeom would be unacquainted with the concept at hand. But theory was very different from the practice of it, and he was uncertain as to whether that gorge was one he wanted to leap just yet. 

Looking beseechingly at Junho-hyung did not help; the man was looking determinedly away, at the swinging sign lit about with red-veiled lanterns, leaving Jaebeom to Wooyoung-hyung’s tender mercies. 

“Don’t fret, Jaebeom-ah,” said Nickhun-hyung, who had returned just the day earlier from a journey to the other end of the kingdom, to hear him tell of it. “The women of this house will be very kind to you, and are very careful about diseases.” 

He had gone with another one of the younger chakho, a tall, slender youth who resembled nothing so much an aspen from the forests north of the kingdom, but had steady hands and steadier nerves besides. Jaebeom had been all over envy, to hear of Jaehyung-hyung’s first kill, the pride leaking through Nickhun-hyung’s voice as he told the tale like a spur in his side. 

But they had hurried back, Jaehyung-hyung had told him, smiling wide, because they wanted to be here with Jaebeom as he grew another year older.

“Di_seases_?” That tree was looking all the more attractive. 

“We cannot be too careful,” Nickhun-hyung said. “The only thing we _chakho _ought to die of are tigers. Or old age. Or in the name of what we choose to fight for, whichever comes sooner.” 

And on that most cheering of notes, they arrived at the red-washed stoop of this teahouse of infinite pleasures. At least that was what Younghyun said the sign read; Jaebeom’s  acquaintance with literacy had, thus far, happened largely as a matter of  coincidence .

His old master had taught him enough to read a bill of payment and some old sword manuals, but so niche and esoteric were they that Jaebeom’s ability to navigate the signposts and boards of everyday life was like that of a mere babe in swaddling cloths. 

T he hyungs who had their letters would  betimes  attempt to ease Jaebeom’s way in life a little more; but given the choice between the calligraphy brush and his sword, or the mind-spinning lines of poetry and the bracingly clear breath of the wind as it whistled through the tops of the pines that Jaebeom had learnt climb up and find a cradle in … 

W ell, at least he knew the characters for his own name and could write them passing well,  Minjun-hyung had sighed on his last visit. And then he had fixed Junho-hyung with a glare, to which Junho-hyung had smiled sheepishly and raised his upturned hands to the sky. 

“If you have so many opinions, hyung-nim,” Junho-hyung had said, shaking the tiger skin he had permanently tied to his person in one fashion or another, “then perhaps you ought to have taken on this mantle instead.”

At which point they had all scattered into other glades, though Jaebeom had climbed up the farthest maple within hearing distance, because this was a mystery that still yet to be unravelled for him.

Minjun-hyung would likely disapprove of this, Jaebeom though despairingly as he was carried along with his brothers into the teahouse of infinite pleasures and crowded into a corner.

Wine had been called for, and already there were hyungs disappearing into the back to do things it did not bear thinking of with the very kind and nice ladies of the establishment.

“He looks so young,” cooed someone whom Jaebeom thought might be the proprietress. “And so handsome, too.”

Jaebeom flushed, though he was determined that it was the wine bringing the heat to his cheeks.

“Our littlest brother,” Junho-hyung said. “Would you be so kind as to find someone who will treat him well?”

“Oh, well,” said the matron, “perhaps we ought to let the lad choose, and guide him by-the-by?”

“I wish not to choose at all,” Jaebeom muttered rapidly into his cup.

“What’s that?” crowed Wooyoung-hyung,whose arm around Jaebeom’s shoulders was growing heavier by the quarter-candle.

Jaebeom sighed and looked up and around; women wrapped in silks and some sort of thin material he had never seen before floated in between the tables, carrying pitchers and trays, all wearing the same sort of enigmatically indulgent smile.

“I said I shall look,” he said.

From slightly across the table, Younghyun sent him a mildly sympathetic smile, before his gaze slid away to the musicians setting up in a corner of the room: a slight youth with a wide mouth and fine features settling down with a gayageum and his companion, a larger fellow with big, watchful eyes, a wolgeum, and – Jaebeom found to his pleasant surprise, once they started in on a popular folk song about the folly of a starling, a startlingly full, raspy singing voice.

Jaebeom let himself be distracted by the light, lilting rhythm of the song, the humorous story unfolding as the larger musician sang and made funny faces. But then autumn fell in the song, and he sat up straight as the gayageum player raised his voice, in a mournful counter-harmony that sat high and strange behind his nose. He turned back to share an impressed look with Younghyun, who seemed to be the only other person in the room paying the players any sort of attention at all.

But there was a wistful look of longing on Younghyun’s face; it seemed almost too private to behold. Feeling strangely embarrassed, Jaebeom looked away to survey the room.

Taking cautious sips from his cup, Jaebeom watched thoughtfully the way he’d learnt to over the years, until Nickhun-hyung laughed and displaced Wooyoung-hyung by some smooth manoeuvre Jaebeom immediately resolved to learn.

“You are handsome enough, lad, without looking like you’re wondering where best to place your shot as you gaze upon the poor ladies of this house.”

Jaebeom blinked. He hadn’t thought – he didn’t know any other way to watch and observe.

“Though I suppose some do like that sort of thing well enough,” Nickhun-hyung added, the innocently thoughtful tone belieing the horror his words bestirred in Jaebeom’s gut. “But come now, has no maid caught your eye?”

“Um,” said Jaebeom.

It hadn’t so much been a matter of no-one being interesting enough, as everyone being interesting in their own way; the sort of interesting that Jaebeom wanted to press into his memory like dried leaves and flowers between the pages of the mulberry-paper book that he knew Younghyun kept secret and safe like the greatest of treasures.

“Perhaps …” Jaebeom pointed at random, to one who looked at least as though she might laugh and tell all if he told her he’d like to climb out of a window and to spend the rest of the night in a tree. “Her?”

Nickhun-hyung hummed and raised his eyebrows, as though he saw more than Jaebeom wanted him to. “Or perhaps the offerings elsewhere might suit you better.”

“No, no,” Jaebeom said, alarmed. “Please, hyung.”

“You needn’t choose at all tonight, you know,” Younghyun put in finally, the song having ended its spell over him. “I didn’t when the hyungs brought me here last year.”

“No,” said Nickhun-hyung, taking a smug sip from his wine. “But you did when I brought you … elsewhere.”

Younghyun cut Nickhun-hyung such a look, it were as though he thought Nickhun-hyung a tiger, or one of the particularly loathsome villains that folk sometimes prevailed upon the _chakho _to hunt. He opened his mouth, as though to say something to match the look.

“Think of it,” said Nickhun-hyung, entirely unaffected, “as another piece of instruction.”

“I hardly think this necessary for the hunting of tigers,” Jaebeom said.

Across the room, the gayageum player’s high, plaintive voice rose up again, this time over the plucking of the wolgeum.

Nickhun-hyung laughed, before grabbing Jaebeom by the scruff of his neck as though he were a cub and hauling him to his feet. Younghyun was of no use at all, being spellbound by the music yet again.

“Well,” said Nickhun-hyung, “let us be off, then.”

Following the excruciating introduction, and the laughingly appraising look that made Jaebeom feel nothing so much as a slab of meat on the butcher’s block, Jaebeom did not, in fact, ask to climb out of the window. This room did not face onto the garden with the hornbeam in it, in any case, and the closest tree could be close cousin to She Who Brooketh Not Discontent herself.

He felt not very much changed, after, in any case: mostly apologetic, and a little grateful to have been so graciously put up with.

“Tis my work,” said his erstwhile companion, pulling her robes together efficiently, “and few would have listened as you did. That made all the difference.”

Shuffling his feet in embarrassment, Jaebeom tugged his own robes back into place, eyes fixed on his own hands. “I, um, thank you for your instruction.”

“I think,” she said, a smile in her voice and feet padding across the room so she could reach up to pat him on the cheek. With the candle relit, Jaebeom thought the lines spidering out from the corners of her eyes particularly comforting, even if her words that followed were not. “I think you shall grow up quite well, my boy.”

**肆**

As soon as he saw the lord Ahn Hyeon turn to leave with his entourage, Jaebeom unfolded from his perch, ran without subtlety back to the glade along the interlocking branches of these wetland trees, and fair tumbled out of the very last tree along his path into the glade.

“Jaebeom,” said Junho-hyung without surprise. Well, it wasn’t as though Jaebeom hadn’t made enough noise crashing through the foliage to alert all the _chakho _scattered about, and some of the imperial soldiers besides.

“Please, hyung,” said Jaebeom, skidding onto his knees. “Do not send me away.”

Junho-hyung raised a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Get up, you ridiculous boy.”

“I am no boy,” said Jaebeom, even as he felt the traitorous flush rising to his cheeks yet again.

“Please do not listen to Wooyoung-hyung when it comes to these matters.”

“But,” Jaebeom decided to try a different tack. “Hyung, I can fight. You’ve seen me. You know what I can do. You know you have use of me in battle.”

“Not this one,” said Junho-hyung, bleak and pale under the dirt on his face, grim lines carved about his mouth. Grasping Jaebeom by the upper arm, he pulled Jaebeom down to glare him in the eye. “Jaebeom-ah, as you love me, do as I bid you.”

It made him squirm a little, inside: without Junho-hyung, Jaebeom would never have found the brotherhood, or the friendship, or the family that he was soon to lose again. Sent away like a toothless, unblooded babe, ‘ere he could ever take his own kill and be properly counted amongst the_ chakho._ But he had helped track a dozen tigers and bring them in for the final kill, had served as lookout, had thought himself at home.

Desperately, Jaebeom assayed one last plea: “But Younghyun is not much older than I, and – ”

Junho’s grasp on his arm grew tighter, his knuckles whitening. “Do not – Jaebeom, I may send only one of you away.”

Reaching out to grasp Junho-hyung’s forearm in turn, Jaebeom said only: “Hyung ...”

“Please.” Junho-hyung’s voice cracked.

It stunned Jaebeom: he had heard Junho say “please” sarcastically before, or in the way that meant anything _but_ a plea. This, though. Time was briefly out of joint, and it felt a little like the earth had juddered askew. A strange, vinegar-y sensation spread out like ink diffusing through water behind his sternum.

Fifteen and about to be cast adrift again, Jaebeom looked aside and asked, “Will you come to Sangju, then, after the battle is done?”

“Why do you wish to fight, Jaebeom?” Junho-hyung entirely ignored his question, having clearly perceived the corresponding crack in Jaebeom’s resolve not to be sent away and decided to proceed onto delivering the last piece of advice he could.

Jaebeom stabbed at the damp ground underfoot with the toe of his boot. “Because you and all my brothers will be.” He did not say anything of what lay in his heart: that he was still unblooded, unlike even Younghyun by now, and had not a tiger pelt to his name. “And I wish to be by your sides, come what may. To do as I have done and keep watch for your safety.”

“So you see,” Junho-hyung said, shaking the arm he still held in his sure-fingered grasp, “that we too wish for your safety.”

“You think me inept,” Jaebeom accused. “And so send me away.”

“No!” barked Junho-hyung. “No, but you are over-eager, and this is not a battle for the mere whetting of your blade.”

Jaebeom was silenced a while, working through Junho-hyung’s meaning. It was most unfair, how Junho-hyung seemed to see into the jealous little thoughts in his heart no matter what veils Jaebeom tried to draw over it. He looked all about the glade and back down at their shadows, growing long in the grass.

Mumbling, he said, “I do not wish to see you die, hyung.”

With a rueful sigh, Junho-hyung let go of his arm. Jaebeom wondered if Junho-hyung might bestow upon him one of the idiosyncratic blessings that he liked to think of whilst on the hunt.

“This sword of yours,” said Junho-hyung, gesturing at Jaebeom’s scabbard, “and this heart of yours.” He tapped Jaebeom over where his heart was already thumping a mournful leave-taking. “I hope you will find your purpose, Jaebeom-ah.”

**伍**

The first time that Jaebeom laid eyes on the Crown Prince was before his official presentation.

He had arrived at Hanyang late at night with Lord Ahn Hyeon’s messengers from Sangju, too late to be sent to the prince. Ahn Hyeon’s men had deposited him in the care of some finely dressed men in tall hats: they were all soft, Jaebeom thought to himself, soft fingers and bodies and faces. It was only their eyes that were like those of snakes, and their tongues too.

They looked at him, and there was a cruel laughter in their eyes.

But he felt, even as the men spoke as though he were not standing there before them, trying hard not to shuffle awkwardly in place or startle at the strange noises that this ornate house with its close walls and low ceilings made, that the laughter was not only for him.

“Perhaps the General does not love the Prince so well as we thought,” said one man with a particularly evil moustache to another, “to have sent such a boy as this.”

Jaebeom felt his fingers twitch, even as he fixed his gaze upon this one tall hat amongst the others.

“One callow youth to suit another,” said another fellow musingly. “Well. Know you your manners, child?”

Clenching his left hand in his robes, Jaebeom tried bowing the way he had seen Lord Ahn Hyeon’s men do before they had left him pityingly behind.

“I have some,” he said honestly in the only way he knew, “but not for the Palace, I do not think.”

“Well,” said a third, whose face was carved with lines of laughter rather than cruelty, at least, “protocol and manners may be fixed, at the very least. The Emperor’s guards will see to you – take the boy to him now.” He gestured at one of the guards hidden in the shadows of the room, and so Jaebeom was dismissed.

With no little relief, he followed the man out and into the warren of the imperial grounds.

Already, he missed the open air of the mountains, the endless sense of space expanding in all directions. He looked up at the night sky, interrupted by roofs in the periphery of his vision, and sighed.

“Word to the wise, lad,” said Jaebeom’s guide, with a little kindness in his voice. “It would do you well not to sigh so around the nobles. Or at all, really.”

“Will they have me dead?” asked Jaebeom curiously. “And the prince?”

“I have rarely been in the prince’s household, and have not had the honour of beholding him,” said his guide. “But know that there are fates worse than death.”

Jaebeom sighed again, and then yawned.

The guard glanced at him over his shoulder, a quick humorous gleam in his eye. “You will have a bed soon, lad, do not fall asleep now.”

“I shall not,” said Jaebeom, covering his mouth.

“There,” said the guard, pointing off into the southwest, “there is the prince’s household.”

Jaebeom looked; down one wide thoroughfare between palaces was a cluster of buildings and a few likely-looking trees drooping over the tall bamboo fence set about the whole palace. The waxing moon shone silver over the shingles and reddening leaves.

It had probably been this first sight, Jaebeom decided later as he set out across the palace grounds from the barracks he had been given a bed in for now, stealing from shadow to shadow, that put this mad plan in his mind.

He just wanted to _see_ for himself, he reasoned, even as he flattened himself against the rough wall of some building, a pair of guards marching past on their round. Without any sort of contrivance or ritual or the endless ornamentation that palace life seemed to demand, Jaebeom wanted to see for himself what sort of place he had been sent to live in, and what sort of person the Crown Prince was.

They did not bother themselves much with the rulers of this country, the _chakho._ There was enough to do in the mountains and forests, enough to busy themselves with in the aid of villages that Jaebeom thought these men in their fine robes and tall hats did not ever think of, without bothering with the nameless, faceless powers who only demanded a yearly tithe whether the harvest was good or no.

He leapt lightly up the fence – no obstacle after three years with She Who Brooketh Not Discontent – and from thence quickly into the broad hornbeam that had drawn his attention.

It was only once ensconced suitably in it that Jaebeom discovered the flaw in his plan: he had no idea where the prince’s quarters were, and the art of stealing through a house, he had not acquired just yet. The secondary flaw, of course, was that in the dead of the night there was not a soul astir, and Jaebeom was not quite so curious as to find the prince’s sleeping chamber.

That, as Minjun-hyung would say, would be the very back of the beyond. Minjun-hyung had come to join the _chakho_ in their contribution to Lord Ahn Hyeon’s forces, so at least Jaebeom had seen him one last time.

And so Jaebeom was now stuck up a tree, a little like the tiger cub he and Younghyun had found once, and saved with only a few claw-marks for their troubles, and wondering what he ought to do now that his blood was high from the thrill of creeping out under the nose of the captain whose care Jaebeom had fallen under.

It was pleasant up here, in any case: a little closer to the sky, with the autumn breeze rustling through the leaves and the air a little less stifling. In another tree somewhere nearby, a nightbird trilled its song.

He was unsure of how much time had passed, only that he ought to rouse himself and return to the bed he had been given soon, when a soft snick made him almost lose his balance.

There was a little squeak, and then the sound of a door sliding open, loud enough to be from a nearby building.

Cautiously, Jaebeom peered through the leaves.

He felt – stricken. He felt a little like he thought Younghyun might have felt, watching the players perform not even a year ago.

There, stepping softly out onto the verandah, could only be the Crown Prince.

Jaebeom had never given much thought to what a prince would look like, before, but it seemed to him now that this boy was the beginning and end of all possibility. No one else could have that selfsame regal bearing, even when softened and a little rumpled from sleep, or a face so fair, like … the book of precious flower and leaf pressings that Younghyun kept came to Jaebeom’s mind.

Like that, exactly like that very thing.

The Crown Prince closed his eyes and raised his face to the moonlight, parted his lips in a soft sigh that Jaebeom couldn’t hear.

And then, most horribly, he sat down, absently rearranging the fine, thin robes that were surely the ones he slept in, and leaned back on his hands to continue contemplating the moon. His hair, loosely bound, fell over his shoulders.

Shifting uncomfortably on the bough that he was sitting on, Jaebeom thought he might perhaps have not thought this through well enough.

**零**

He could hear the Prince approaching from at least twenty paces away.

Jaebeom’s heart shivered within him.

It was as well that he was in a bamboo grove, and that there were no conveniently branched and foliage’d trees for him to escape into.

Focussing all of his attention onto the practised movements worn like grooves into a rock by running water, Jaebeom managed to at least put the Prince’s imminent arrival out of his mind until he turned around and saw him.

There was naked awe on the Prince’s face.

He felt the blood rise to his face, and turned hastily away, spilling the cup balanced on his sword to the ground. It did not break, thank the Merciful Bodhisattva. Beneath it, the ground darkened to a deeper brown.

“You are very skilled,” the Prince told him, in that carefully held way, in that voice like cloudy amber that made _something_ strange and not-altogether-unpleasant curl up along Jaebeom’s lower back. To hear this was nothing new: even amongst the _chakho_, he had had the enjoyment of acknowledgement in this regard. And yet out of the mouth of the Prince the words sounded new as tender, spring-green grass.

Entirely unaware of the turmoil currently raging within Jaebeom’s ribs, the Prince continued, “I am not displeased that you have chosen not to train with my father’s guards.”

It had not occurred to Jaebeom, truly, that he would have been expected to train with anyone’s guards but the Prince’s own. It was only just now occurring to Jaebeom, truly, that it was passing strange that the Crown Prince should only have one personal guard, and that it be Jaebeom.

Old Moo Hyul was another with fondness for the Crown Prince, and Jaebeom remembered him faintly from a visit with his old swordsmaster a long time ago, but the man was old if skilled, and more like to die than succeed in defence of the Prince.

He sheathed his sword after shaking the water off it, staring at a patch of grass that looked a little like a tiger cub tumbling over its own tail, if he imagined hard enough.

Utterly at a loss, Jaebeom resorted to pure honesty, thinking perhaps it were best to assure the prince of his worth and said, “I’m better with a musket.”

The Prince was silent for a moment, one that lasted long enough for Jaebeom to glance uncertainly up at his improbable face. He felt his heart seize again in his chest, the strange weightlessness in the pit of his belly, and thought yet again that perhaps Hanyang was more dangerous than hunting tigers.

This proved likelier the truth when in the next moment, laughter rang about the grove, the corners of the Prince’s eyes creased most distressingly as he covered his mouth with those long-fingered hands.

Jaebeom stared at the Prince, half-bent over with the force of his laughter, confused and uncertain and very much overwhelmed by how all that cold, elegant beauty had melted away into this: another boy who could have been friends with him and Younghyun, rolling about on mountain grass at some jest or other.

“Your … Imperial Highness?” Jaebeom asked tentatively, recalling the proper form of address at last. “Are you … all right?”

His Imperial Highness most alarmingly sank all the way to the ground, folding his legs under himself as he wheezed. Jaebeom tried very hard to remember from the briefings if the Crown Prince had any sort of weakness in the lungs that he ought have known about.

“Yes,” the Prince managed to get out in between what Jaebeom realised, with a sensation much like the bottom of his stomach had fallen out, were giggles. “Yes, please, do not let me cut your training short. Carry on.”

Jaebeom was not sure if he could even put one foot in front of the other. “I – how come you to be here all alone, Your Highness?”

“Jaebeom,” said the Prince, calmer now, “this grove may well be the safest place for me at present, though you are without a musket. Continue; I shall wait to return together with you.”

There was a warmth in his eyes heretofore unseen, and an upward curl to the corner of his lips that spoke of more laughter, tucked away for the present. Jaebeom was seized, most violently and suddenly, by the surge of a desire to draw it out again, and often besides.

“I – of course,” said Jaebeom, still bewildered by the Prince’s laughter and these new feelings too.

He almost tripped over his own feet, turning away to pick up the fallen teacup, and breathed deep to find the quiet, watchful centre he slipped into when sparring with swords or tracking tigers. And yet, as Jaebeom drew his sword again, slid his feet out into the opening stance of the next set of movements, he felt the Prince’s gaze betwixt his shoulders, patient and searingly expectant.

In the pause between breaths, between stillness and movement, clarity of purpose settled over Jaebeom rather like a tiger pelt, and he leapt.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! 
> 
> if you enjoyed this or it made you feel a thing, please hit the kudos button, let me know what you think in the comments, and hit the RT whenever I ... make a tweet about this.


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